What are the truth conditions of want ascriptions? According to an influential approach, they are intimately connected to the agent’s beliefs: ⌜S wants p⌝ is true iff, within S’s belief set, S prefers the p worlds to the not-p worlds. This approach faces a well-known problem, however: it makes the wrong predictions for what we call (counter)factual want ascriptions, wherein the agent either believes p or believes not-p—for example, ‘I want it to rain tomorrow and that is exactly what is (...) going to happen’ or ‘I want this weekend to last forever, but of course it will end in a few hours’. We solve this problem. The truth conditions for want ascriptions are, we propose, connected to the agent’s conditional beliefs. We substantiate this connection by pursuing a striking parallel between (counter)factual and non-(counter)factual want ascriptions on the one hand and counterfactual and indicative conditionals on the other. (shrink)

This paper investigates the semantics of measure phrases in Japanese. Based on new data, we argue that the interpretation of measure phrases in Japanese is sensitive to scale structure such that (i) measure phrases are introduced by a degree morpheme that selects only for gradable predicates whose scale contains a minimal element (i.e., a lower closed scale) and (ii) violations to this restriction are repaired via coercion, which forces a comparative interpretation with a contextually determined standard and hence a minimal (...) element. We compare the Japanese facts to data in other languages and argue that the requirement of having a minimal element is not specific to Japanese, but universal. We show that languages may vary in how they deal with potential violations of this universal constraint, including coercion of a contextually recoverable derived minimal element (Japanese), ungrammaticality (e.g., Spanish, Korean, Russian), and a hybrid system of ungrammaticality for some adjectives and allowed constraint violation for others (e.g., English, German, Italian). (shrink)

Recent work on mood choice considers fine-grained semantic differences among desire predicates (notably, ‘want’ and ‘hope’) and their consequences for the distribution of indicative and subjunctive complement clauses. In that vein, this paper takes a close look at ‘intend’. I show that cross-linguistically, ‘intend’ accepts nonfinite and subjunctive complements and rejects indicative complements. This fact poses difficulties for recent approaches to mood choice. Toward a solution, a broad aim of this paper is to argue that—while ‘intend’ is loosely in the (...) family of desire predicates—it differs from ‘want’ and ‘hope’ in that it has a causative component, and this is relevant to its mood choice behavior, given that causative predicates also systematically reject indicative complements. More concretely, my analysis has three ingredients: (i) following related proposals in philosophy, intention reports have causally self-referential content; (ii) encoding causal self-reference requires abstraction over the complement clause’s eventuality argument; and (iii) nonfinite and subjunctive clauses enable such abstraction but indicative clauses do not. Aside from causative predicates, independent support for the proposal comes from the syntax of belief-/intention-hybrid attitude predicates like ‘decide’ and ‘convince’, anankastic conditional antecedents, aspectual predicates, and memory and perception reports. Synthesizing this result with that of previous literature, the emergent generalization is that subjunctive mood occurs in attitude reports that involve either comparison or eventuality abstraction. Toward a unified theory of mood choice, I suggest that both comparison and eventuality abstraction represent departures from the clausal semantics of unembedded assertions and consequently that subjunctive mood signals such a departure. (shrink)

Propositional attitude reports are sentences built around clause-embedding psychological verbs, like Kim believes that it's raining or Kim wants it to rain. These interact in many intricate ways with a wide variety of semantically relevant grammatical phenomena, and represent one of the most important topics at the interface of linguistics and philosophy, as their study provides insight into foundational questions about meaning. This book provides a bird's-eye overview of the grammar of propositional attitude reports, synthesizing the key facts, theories, and (...) open problems in their analysis. Couched in the theoretical framework of generative grammar and compositional truth-conditional semantics, it places emphasis on points of intersection between propositional attitude reports and other important topics in semantic and syntactic theory. With discussion points, suggestions for further reading and a useful guide to symbols and conventions, it will be welcomed by students and researchers wishing to explore this fertile area of study. (shrink)

Infinitives are known to encode covert modality in certain environments including infinitival relatives and questions. Beyond these environments, however, the precise distribution and interpretation of infinitival modality remains poorly understood. In that light, this paper investigates infinitive-embedding _enough_/_too_ sentences like _Pat is tall enough to be the thief_ or _Lee is too old to drive_. These sentences have a modal semantics whose compositional source is contested: on one approach, the infinitive encodes the modality, and on another approach, the _enough_/_too_ morpheme (...) itself is modal. To adjudicate this debate, I consider heretofore largely overlooked _finite_-clause-embedding _enough_ sentences like _Pat is tall enough that she might/must be the thief_ or _Lee was fast enough that she won the race_. They provide, I argue, novel support for the view that the modality is in the embedded clause (whether nonfinite or finite) and not in _enough_/_too_. I then compare the covert modality of nonfinite _enough_ clauses to the covert modality of infinitival relatives, questions, and complements to attitude predicates and content nouns. I generalize that covert modality in nonfinite clauses never encodes epistemic necessity, and I tentatively hypothesize that this constraint reflects the marked status of nonfiniteness in the finite/nonfinite opposition. (shrink)